*penumbra report.

they told me that

when they got ready,

they were going to

tie us up to a tree

and

blow.our.brains.out

::SOPHIA STONE (1933 Kidnap victim of Bonnie & Clyde)::

Jennifer Tilly, in the horror-comedy flick Bride of Chucky, hires a man to bring her the remains of her dead lover. She uses black magic to resurrect the psychoslayer, because she’s been unable to find another guy who can satisfy her freaky needs like he once did. Once reawakened, Chucky’s still an asshole, slapping her and chiding her for wanting to be his bride, but the fire between them still burns like hell. The murder and mayhem begin anew, the gore starts oozing, the bodies fall. She purrs to him, “You always did know how to show a girl a good time.”

The demented dyad from Bride of Chucky are reminiscent of Depression Era media darlings Bonnie and Clyde. There is something altogether attractive about the fated lovers. Are Bonnie and Clyde just Romeo and Juliet in a getaway car? What makes them such provocative icons? So unabashedly erotic, wild, and popular? Instantly intimate. Infinitely imitable. They are prime slices of American celebrity. Their story is lacquered with mythos. Time has not dulled its impact, its force, and its sense of winking nihilism. And as Valentine’s Day draws nigh, we can still feel the psychological sweat stains they left on our culture… lingering impressions like the after-images that appear after vigorously rubbing your eyes with your fist. As one witness to the couple’s death says, “I guess I will never forget the sight of that car. It looked like where hogs had been slaughtered.”

“Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome,” or, more accurately, Hybristophilia (from the Greek root Hybridzein: to commit an outrageous offense) is defined by sexologist Dr. John Money as “being sexuoerotically turned on only by a partner who has a predatory history of outrages perpetrated on others.” It may result in an irresistible compulsion to seek out and partner with heinous sexual sadists in crimes against others. There is no profile of hybristophiliacs that covers them all except this: They have an overwhelming lust for outrageous violence.

Young lovers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate epitomized the teen couple on a killing spree—their true story provided the foundation for movies like Badlands, Natural Born Killers and Wild at Heart. In 1958, 14 year old Fugate’s family forbade her to marry 19 year old Starkweather, a bowlegged, ne’er-do-well punk with a history of violent assault. So her mother, stepfather and infant sister were all summarily murdered as the couple kicked off an infamous eight-day killing spree.

Though Caril Ann aided and abetted Starkweather, collecting newspaper clippings of their adventures as they ran from police and racked up bodies, she later claimed to have been forced against her will to stay with him. She witnessed her family’s death, then stayed in the house with Starkweather for five days afterwards, screwing and playing house while keeping relatives at bay. She guarded some of their captives while he napped, and she held a loaded gun on others, but she swore that she was a hostage and not an accomplice. The courts didn’t buy it, sentencing her to a hefty term behind bars, and even Starkweather, on his way to the electric chair, testified to her powers. Caril was “something worth killing for,” he said before his death. “She put the spark and thrill into the killing.”

There in lies the magic. The eroticism inherent in exploring the horrors of our anarchic impulses. We are all innately perverse, capable of enormous cruelty and paradoxically, our talent for the perverse, the violent, the alien, the obscene, may be a good thing. This is the nekyia or the archetypal descent into the enigmatic land of the dead, the realm of the unconscious. We have to go through this phase in order to reach something on the other side; it’s a mistake to hold back and refuse to accept one’s nature. “One has to,” as Joseph Conrad said, “immerse oneself in the most destructive element, and swim.”

University of Georgia literature professor Joel Black stated that “(if) any human act evokes the aesthetic experience of the sublime, certainly it is the act of murder.” Black goes on to note that “…if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist — a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction.” André Breton’s 1929 Second Manifesto on surrealist art stated that “L’acte surréaliste le plus simple consiste, revolvers aux poings, à descendre dans la rue et à tirer au hasard, tant qu’on peut, dans la foule” [The simplest Surrealist act consists of running down into the street, pistols in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd].” It is no wonder that these vigilante lovers have been thoroughly embraced in cinema.

Wild at Heart, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, True Romance, Natural Born Killers. Each of these films follows the crime spree of a pair of lovers for whom sex and violence become entangled in an imaginary world of white trash aesthetics and 50s pop culture references. There are many parallel themes and imagery. Tony Scott intentionally pays homage to many road movies and couple-on-the-run classics that formed the implicit basis of the screenplay. Setting the tone is the film’s opening that re-uses the signature music from Badlands, while Patricia Arquette’s lazy voice-over nearly draws the scene into the realm of parody.

Style is synonymous with identity for these characters. Note that both Sailor and Clarence are obsessed with Elvis Presley to the point that they imitate the King’s mannerisms almost reflexively. Sailor is practically glued to the inside of his jacket, “a symbol of my individuality, and my belief… in personal freedom.” And it is impossible to forget that critical getaway scene in Badlands where Kit fixes his hair in the mirror. The sleazy white-trash style and bleach-blonde hair of Mallory, Lula, Alabama are almost identical. The protagonists in these films are outsiders, usually poor, and with very distinct almost neurotic behaviors, and they all hold an insurmountable love for rock-n-roll and American iconography – a theme that Tarantino and Lynch constantly revisit in their movies. The protagonists of these films were never properly introduced to the world we live in. They are from strange and idyllic parallel dimensions; the characters live in an animated state of constant kitsch. In an interview, Terence Malick explains how the psychic milieu of Badlands transcends its chronology:

I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality. Children’s books are full of violence. Long John Silver slits the throats of the faithful crew. Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale. Holly says, “Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened.” But she enough believes there is such a place that she must confess to you she never got there.

This gets at the crux of what we desire in outlaw couples: to be in a constant state of abandonment. To be out on the lam, letting your primal urges take control, being constantly reborn. A baptism of blood that wipes the slate clean. Adam and Eve in the Garden but with the dramatic satisfaction of a whirlwind romance. The Garden is a getaway car (or an RV). A state of flux that implies release from the prisons of domestic responsibility. The Bonnie and Clyde archetype delves deep into the psyche fusing Pagan eroticism of antiquity with an Abrahamic creation mythos. “I see angels, Mickey. They’re comin’ down for us from heaven. And I see you ridin’ a big red horse, and you’re driving them horses, whippin’ ‘em, and the’re spitting and frothing all ‘long the mouth, and the’re coming right at us. And I see the future, and there’s no death, ’cause you and I, we’re angels…” Indeed. Mickey and Mallory confer a perpetual of divine opposites akin to that of Shiva and Kali. Their dance is the dance of creation, the dance of destruction, the dance of solace and liberation. Beneath their foot ignorance is crushed; from their heads springs the life-giving waters. The rhythm they dance to is that of a world perpetually forming, dissolving and re-forming.

Hence the snake imagery in Natural Born Killers and Sailor’s Snakeskin jacket. Shiva too, was laced with snake imagery. Snakes are symbols of cosmic rebirth and fertility. This trait is connected with the practice of snakes of shedding their old skin and growing a new one. The snake’s venom has the power to either heal, poison or provide expanded consciousness and even immortality through divine intoxication. It is an animal with chthonic properties connected to the afterlife. Bonnie and Clyde represent the archetypal twin cosmic serpents in permanent embrace, providing a ladder to the unconscious.

I had a hard time with the scene where Clarence tells me he’s killed Drexl and I say, “What you did was so romantic.” I couldn’t jump to that reaction. My acting coach and I came up with the idea that here’s a man I barely know, who killed someone and is eating a burger. He could kill me next. As a female, the way to stay safe is to be in a love bubble. But part of her does think it’s romantic, like, kill all the mistakes I ever made.

::Patricia Arquette::

I just fell in love with these two characters and didn’t want to see them die. I wanted them together.

::Tony Scott::

It is much better that they were both killed, rather then to have been taken alive.

::Blanche Barrow::

I’m glad Bonnie and Clyde went out like they did because it’s better then getting caught.

::Roy Thornton (Bonnie’s husband)::

Bonnie Parker:You know what, when we started out, I thought we was really goin’ somewhere. This is it. We’re just goin’, huh?Clyde Barrow:I love you.

You can’t take it with you. At least that’s what they used to say. That statement may seem antiquated in an age of continuous cataloging and archiving. The internet is vast and able to hold more information than all the libraries and museums of the world. Furthermore, the information we carry is limitless; infinite knowledge at our fingertips that waits patient and dormant, ready to be called forth into being at any given moment. The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen, making the past simultaneous with the present in a new way. But as three dimensional objects are collapsed and transformed into clean and discreet units of electronic information, we grow more and more nostalgic for the mangled ephemera of generations past… the wear and tear that gives a physical object that unique texture.

Ephemera is transitory written and printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved. The word derives from the Greek, meaning things lasting no more than a day. Some collectible ephemera are advertising trade cards, airsickness bags, bookmarks, catalogs, greeting cards, letters, pamphlets, postcards, posters, prospectuses, stock certificates, tickets and zines. One of my personal favorites are safety matchboxes from Japan and India.

The safety match was invented in 1844. Their safety is due to the separation of the reactive ingredients between a match head on the end of a paraffin-impregnated splint and a special striking surface, and the replacement of white phosphorus with red phosphorus. The exterior of the matchcover is usually imprinted with a producer’s logo, often with artistic decorations, or serves as an advertising/promotional media for the undertaking it is sold or handed off in. The ease of making matchcovers of different shapes also made them quite a popular cheap promotional item or anniversary souvenir. In an era of instant information access and viral publicity, logo-bearing matches may have the edge as ambassadors that convey distinction in their very physicality. Mark Nackman, owner and president of AdMatch, claims that “matches have universal appeal, and that’s the mystery — that one little package could resonate with familiarity, maybe beauty, and a feeling of value.” Frankly, I agree. My Grandma has a very diverse collection (in a fancy glass bowl to boot!) and that is where I first encountered their magic. It is the very banality of the ephemera that makes it so appealing. The idea of finding remarkable beauty in a mundane place; a physical artifact forsaken by the past and only truly understood with perfected wisdom of hindsight. It makes one feel special. And why not, ephemera is just commodified nostalgia.

Daguerreotype portrait depicting Joseph Plateau

The aesthetics of nostalgia might be less a matter of simple memory than of complex projection; the invocation of a partial, idealized history merges with a dissatisfaction with the present. As early as 1798, Immanuel Kant had noted that people who did return home were usually disappointed because, in fact, they did not want to return to a place, but to a time, a time of youth. Time, unlike space, cannot be returned to–ever; time is irreversible. And nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact. This physical and emotional upheaval related to the workings of memory was seen as a “disorder of the imagination” from the start. Nostalgia, in fact, may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia’s power. This is rarely the past as actually experienced, of course; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and desire. In this sense, however, nostalgia is less about the past than about the present.

It operates through what Mikhail Bakhtin called an “historical inversion”: the ideal that is not being lived in the present is projected into the past. It is “memorialized” as past, crystallized into precious moments selected by memory, but also by forgetting, and by desire’s distortions and reorganizations. Simultaneously distancing and approximating, nostalgia exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near. Nostalgia sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe from the unexpected and the untoward, from accident or betrayal, in other words, making it so very unlike the present.

If the present is considered irredeemable, you can look either back or forward. The nostalgic and utopian impulses share a common rejection of the here and now. If the future is cyberspace, then what better way to soothe techno-peasant anxieties than to yearn for a Underwood Typewriter? But there is a rather obvious contradiction here: nostalgia requires the availability of evidence of the past,and it is precisely the electronic and mechanical reproduction of images of the past that plays such an important role in the structuring of the nostalgic imagination today, furnishing it with the possibility of “compelling vitality.”Thanks to the internet, nostalgia no longer has to rely on individual memory or desire: it can be fed forever by quick access to an infinitely recyclable past. That is why there is an incredible surge in nostalgia today.

Three Frames

Video Ephemera and Audio Ephemera refers to transitory audiovisual matter not intended to be retained or preserved. The large capacity and reach provided by resources such as the Internet Archive and YouTube have made finding and sharing video ephemera (past and present) dramatically easier. My own video work as well as that of many of my peers relies heavily on found footage and recycled images. An interesting correlation can be observed between pre-cinematic moving images of the late 19th Century and the contemporary rise of GIF art. Like their erstwhile forebears, GIFs transport the viewer into a dimension unlike anything we experience in waking life.

Sites like Rhizome, 8-Bit Today, and Nasty Nets dig through the deepest recesses of the Internet to find these oddball creations. Many of these artists go by aliases that recall the early days of message board handles and instant messaging screen names (e.g., Videogramo and Out 4 Pizza), and host their works at sprawling Web pages that are part portfolio, part art installations. Others opt to use their real names, and even occasionally find their works in respected galleries. Michael Bell-Smith, for instance, has been featured at the New Museum in New York. Many pieces of animated GIF art are abstract designs, while others relish in their dated appearance — incorporating ’80s and ’90s goth and cyberpunk influences as well as classic video game elements. Results often careen wildly from creepy and unsettling to oddly beautiful…

::Terence OBrien::

GIF art recalls the pioneering work of Eadweard Muybridge. There is something intrinsically haunting about Muybridge’s animations. The subjects of his photography experiments feel as if they are living fragments… two-dimensional ghosts, tethered to the frame, suspended in Hell, sentenced forever to repeat the same actions like the mythic Sisyphus. In 1867, under the trade pseudonym ‘Helios’, Muybridge set out to record the scenery of the far West with his mobile darkroom, christened ‘The Flying Studio’. He produced notable stereoscopic views, and later, panoramas including an important series showing San Francisco. His reputation as a photographer of the first rank spread, and he was approached by the President of the Central Pacific Railroad, Leland Stanford, to attempt to photograph a horse trotting at speed, to settle a long-standing controversy among racing men as to whether a trotting horse had all four hooves off the ground at any point. In the Spring of 1872 Muybridge photographed the horse Occident, but without any great success, as the current wet collodion process normally required many seconds for a good result. In April 1873 he managed to produce some better negatives in which a recognisable silhouette of the horse showed all four feet above the ground at the same time.

Soon after, Muybridge left his young wife, Flora, to go on a photographic trip. While he was away, she had an affair with a Major Harry Larkyns and became pregnant. Muybridge – an imposing figure in broad-brimmed hat and long white beard – discovering that the child was not his, confronted Larkyns, and shot him dead. Tried for murder in February 1875, Muybridge was acquitted by the jury on the grounds of justifiable homicide; he left soon after on a long trip to Central America. On his return, he took up the action photography project once more. Using a new shutter design he had develped which operated in as little as 1/1000th of a second, he obtained more detailed pictures in July 1877. He then devised a new scheme, which Stanford sponsored at his farm at Palo Alto. A fifty-foot-long shed was constructed, containing twelve cameras side by side, facing a white background marked off with vertical, numbered lines. Each camera was fitted with Muybridge’s high-speed shutter, released by an electromagnetic catch. Thin threads stretched across the track were broken by the horse as it moved along, closing spring electrical contacts which released each shutter in turn. Thus in about half a second, twelve photographs were obtained showing all the phases of the movement. Later, twenty four cameras were used; and lateral cameras giving oblique views. The sequences published in scientific and photographic journals throughout the world excited considerable attention. By replacing the threads with an electrical commutator device, releasing the shutters at precise intervals, Muybridge was able to take series of actions by other animals and humans, projecting his results in motion on the screen with his Zoopraxiscope projector. This machine, described by the Illustrated London News as ‘a magic lantern run mad‘ was basically a projecting phenakistiscope, with a contra-rotating shutter. This technology is the backbone of cinema.

::Muybridge text ripped and stolen from the work of Stephen Herbert and Brian Coe::

*Penumbra Report owes its creative genesis in part to the delicate midwifery of an anthropomorphic machine. I was at Blue Moon Camera and Machine developing film and visiting my friend Christie Spillane, when my partner in slime, Lady Quackery, noticed the elegantly framed poster of NAKED LUNCH above what appeared to be a shrine / display of beautifully refurbished typewriters. We became hysterical. In a frenzy we rushed to the display and began typing on the mahines. After caressing and groping each and every one of those beautiful machines, we tucked in our shirts, pulled up our stockings, fixed our hair, decided we had somehow descended into some sort of temporary madness, and promptly left the store. We were mere feet from the car when that hot, typological fever took hold of our loins and dragged us back inside hysterically screaming until an early 1930s Underwood No. 5 was purchased. It’s been true love ever since.

When most people think “typewriter,” they picture something much like the Underwood No. 5. Why? Because this is the most successful typewriter design in history. When the Underwood was first introduced, it was only one of hundreds of competing and extremely varied typewriter designs. But by 1920, this machine, succeeded in defining the stereotype of a typewriter: a machine with four rows of keys and a shift, typing with typebars through a ribbon onto the front of a cylindrical rubber platen. This is the form that still determines our concept of what a typewriter is — or “was.” The No. 5 was the quintessential Underwood.

The CURE for modern machine angst resides within. Does our disposable culture leave you worried? Fed up with squandering your hard-earned equipment budget on devices rendered obsolete before they are even broken in? Searching for a companion machine with which you might actually have time to become intimately familiar?

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::Blue Moon Camera and Machine::

In some ways typewriters are fascinating because they are the predecessors of the electric processors used today. As Walter J. Ong puts it, “Since writing came into existence, the evolution of the word and the evolution of consciousness have been intimately tied in with technologies and technological developments.” Although, the most alluring characteristic about these machines is that they can be seen not only as tools of a bygone era, but independent psychological entities autonomous of human will. There is something inherently different about a MacBook Pro and an Underwood No.5. The MacBook is like an inanimate terminal, sterile and often cold to the touch. On the other hand, the Underwood is pulsating, arousing, virile… almost sentient. It comes down to the feel of these machines. A typewriter can be a guiding tutelary spirit or, contrastingly, a demonic presence or pet-like familiar. The only difference between familiars and demons are the specific ways in which a familiar possesses an individual. In contrast to demons, familiars do not possess the body. They rather possess the personality, the soul, the human affective relations and the psychological processes of a victim, but the familiar spirit maintains a differentiated personality with those who attack. Sometimes the familiar spirit entices the human spirit by appearing friendly and comforting when things go wrong, thus developing a progressive dependence on the spirit and the diminishing reliance of one’s individuality. Akin to a mercurial spirit, the typewriter acts as a medium (think both senses of the word), that creates a vortex and tearing a hole into other realms. It has magical powers because it is, in fact, a window — a hole in the wholeness of our world (which is never a seamless wholeness), through which our imagination may come in contact with the symbolic dimension.

The invention of the typewriter changed the course of Western culture, forever mutating the topographical landscape of literature. Many authors and writers have had unusual relationships with typewriters. Friedrich Nietzsche used a typewriter in an attempt to stem his migraine headaches and his incipient blindness. Mark Twain claimed in his autobiography that he was the first important writer to present a publisher with a typewritten manuscript, for Life on the Mississippi. E. E. Cummings may have been the first poet to deliberately use a typewriter for poetic effect. Jack Kerouac, a fast typist at 100 words per minute, typed On the Road on a roll of paper so he wouldn’t be interrupted by having to change the paper. Within two weeks of starting to write On the Road, Kerouac had one single-spaced paragraph, 120 feet long. Another fast typist of the Beat period was Richard Brautigan, who said that he thought out the plots of his books in detail beforehand, then typed them out at speeds approaching 90 to 100 words a minute. Ernest Hemingway used to write his books standing up in front of a Royal typewriter suitably placed on a tall bookshelf. Tom Robbins waxes philosophical about the Remington SL3, a typewriter that he bought to write Still Life with Woodpecker, and eventually does away with it because it is too complicated and inhuman of a machine for the writing of poetry. After completing the novel Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen is said to have flung his typewriter into the Aegean Sea. William S. Burroughs wrote in some of his novels that “a machine he called the ‘Soft Typewriter’ was writing our lives, and our books, into existence,” according to a book review in The New Yorker (the image to the right isClaes Oldenburg’s eponymous sculpture).

Of course, David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of Burroughs’ novel, Naked Lunch, is perhaps the greatest example of the morbid and perverse relationship between man and typewriter. In the film, Burroughs’ typewriter is a living, insect-like entity (voiced by Canadian actor Peter Boretski) and actually dictates the book to him.

Onscreen NakedLunch recalls both TheShelteringSky and BartonFink in its respective evocations of the life of the literary exile and the torment of trying to write. Mr. Cronenberg’s hideously clever contribution in the latter realm is the insect-cum-typewriter that supposedly assists Bill in his efforts but clearly has a mind of its own. Both the writing bug and the Mugwump, a man-sized and rather soigné strain of monster, are capable of registering their approval by oozing viscous, intoxicating substances from various parts of their anatomies. “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” Bill is told upon encountering his first cigarette-smoking Mugwump on a bar stool in Interzone. “He specializes in sexual ambivalence.”

::Janet Maslin, Drifting In and Out of a Kafkaesque Reality::

Cronenberg and Burroughs share a biologist’s detached view of humans as species. They view the species in evolutionary terms. A post-humanist stance that visualizes man as being in a brave new denatured world of permeable boundaries. Technology reaches directly into unseen depths, stimulating the ganglia and the viscera, caressing and remolding the interior volume of the body. In this way, Kafka’s Metamorphosis of industrial man into primordial insect parallels the current transformation of mediated man into futuristic machine.

In this video, a robot re-enacts the typing of a love letter from Franz Kafka to Felize Bauer, in which Kafka makes reference to typing the letter on a typewriter and expresses the impact the new writing device has on his train of thought:

The link between insects and technology is not new. To quote Virgil’s Aeneid, “And now Aeneas saw in a side valley a secluded grove with copses of rustling trees where the river Lethe glided along past peaceful dwelling houses. Around it fluttered numberless races and tribes of men, like bees in a meadow on a clear summer day, settling on all the many-coloured flowers and crowding round the gleaming white lilies while the whole plain is loud with their buzzing.” The souls of the dead draw from the rivers of forgetfulness to re-format their hard drives and enter a new life back on earth. Virgil, the son of a beekeeper, makes the comparison between human and bee society throughout his verse. As in the Roman ideal, the world of the bee depends on the rule of a single monarch, and members are ready to sacrifice their lives for the whole. Insect colonies offer themselves up as mirrors for their human hosts. They provide a symbolic language for arguing between the needs of the collective and the individual. Like insects themselves, these representations mutate over time and evolve into exotic models of human behavior. McLuhan spoke of the mission of humans to ‘fecundate’ technology. It was a tenuous metaphor to begin with. Today it barely rates as a metaphor – more like a description. The industrial nature of insects have made them the perfect symbol for the modern age.

Ladislaw Starewicz (1882-1965), born in Russia from Polish parents was a stop-motion animator who used insects and animals as his protagonists. Biologist, in 1920 he became director of the Natural History Museum in Kaunas. Inspired by the stop-motion animation work of Emile Cohl he began producing nature documentaries about the lives of insects, experimenting with the use of live insects at first and then the animation of small articulated puppets created with the carcasses of dead insects. His insects’ nimble gestures lead one through an array of human emotions, and to a heightened sense of sympathy and forgiveness. This may be why his insects and animals are so easy to relate to, and why they are so notably Eastern European. Important author, had a great influence on the cinema of animation following up to authors such as Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton. The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912) is a story of betrayal and jealousy, artistic struggle, with a bit of recursive humor too.